Englishman Andrew Sullivan bestows his revelation on us, on the occasion of his disgust at something Pat Buchanan wrote. Buchanan's column is "a travesty of history" and evidence of "America's tragedy of self-forgetting." I don't really need Sullivan's help with American self-remembering, but I did need to read Buchanan's column — which I wouldn't have done otherwise — to get what the condescension is all about.

"Traditional Americans are losing their nation," says Buchanan, channeling the discontent of those people who, Obama once said, "get bitter [and] cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations." Buchanan not only includes the "bitter clingers" quote in the column: he enacts it.

Sullivan is mainly out to discredit the notion that "traditional Americans" are white Americans. Would that matter to Buchanan? I doubt it. He's speaking of the political issues of the day, describing the views of a demographic group, and rejecting the idea that their attitude arises from racial animosity.

“WHITE AMERICANS DO NOT REALIZE HOW BLACK THEY ARE.” Well, possibly. I mean, unless they’ve heard of Elvis, or Rock ‘n’ Roll, or something. Or unless “Pat Buchanan” and “White Americans” are identity sets. Which to a certain class of know-nothing they may seem.

178 comments:

I think the people who are concerned about "losing their nation" are mostly concerned about the millions of illegal immigrants (including the language issues related to that), not the black people who've been here for hundreds of years. So, what is his point, exactly?

Sullivan is so self obssessed that he cannot see straight. He writes an analysis that has very little to do with what Buchanan said, only with Sullivan's own view of Buchanan and race in America. Buchanan's column was not a column attributing concerns to race, but as Ann points out, to political issues. Buchanan's column, in a sense, says it is not about race. Sullivan reads it as all about race.

Ann also is right that Sullivan is condescending, about as condescending as a person can be. I look forward to a day when everyone ignores Sullivan, but he is a like an accident scene where people cannot divert their eyes.

I've done a fair amount of traveling having grown up abroad and been in the service myself.

Most of the foreigners I have met in my time, whether on their turf or ours, are similar in their complete misunderstanding on what it is to be an American in the first place.

There is simply no monolithic American being or culture. Even today, when the melting pot sits congealing in the sink after a long feast, we're still a total greater than the sum of our parts...but of parts we be.

If you want to discuss what we've lost as a culture, start with the complete and abject loss of shame (about anything) in the adult American population and go from there.

Did you know that Sarah Palin's daughter's illegitimate love child that Sarah Palin actually birthed just before they bought that retarded kid to make it look like Sarah and daughter both gave birth was actually black?

Sully confirmed this while engaged in some top-secret spelunking of several Palin birth canals. which is how he learned the real truth.

Pogo - All Saul Alinsky was, was a pale imitator of the Jewish Bolsheviks. Same with Herbert Marcuse. And the Nazi theoreticians on trial after WWII said most of their "inspiration" came from the Bolshevik's design of State control...Much to the chagrin of the Soviet commissars eager for them to shut up, stop smearing the Gulags and necessary liquidations of millions of counter-revolutionaries and incorrect thinkers, and get on with the hangings.

=================As for Queen Andrew, he doesn't have a clue. Most of America north of the Mason Dixon Line and West of the Mississippi grew and developed it's "character and culture" nearly or completely black-free up until the 1910-1920s. When the 1st big migration of blacks out of the South happened. Many people spent their entire lives in New England, Ohio towns, Appalachia, the Great Lakes and Great Plains, the Western towns, the West Coast without seeing a black person - or seeing a few, strange figures of a culture they didn't know or understand...at a distance.

Sullivan sees differences between white Americans and UK Englanders? Really? Well, he can start with the fact that most white Americans are not of English ethnicity. We have European cultural streams that are evidently alien to him - German, Irish, Italian, lots of Catholics, Scandanavian and small but culturally significant numbers and areas of French, Native American, E Asian, Spanish, Jewish influence.

Until recent years, African literacy was under 10% and few people read black authors. Now, it's like Jane Austin..people now read them in school because they are forced to.

You had a few cultural things that blacks played a big role in, in influencing white Southerners - music, some dietary traditions. Something like jazz..But for 95% of our history the rest of America got along pretty well without knowing what the latest black fashions, gang signs, or black sports superstar was..

There are eight regions in American culture with differing points of view, The Connecticutt Yankees from New England have never seen the others except during a brief road trip south by some of the young men in the early 1860s. So welcome to another part of America Mr Sullivan. In the southeast the African slaves stolen by europeans and shipped by New Englanders for profits to fund the industrial wealth there came into the picture in the south after 1820 as agricultural machinery. Before that, much of the settlement meant inter-breeding with the local tribes such as Chickasaw, Creek and Muscogee. To settle past the seacoast and its river highways navigable inland, meant going without the a family and marrying local women with tribal connections. The agricultural base then was overlayed by railroads and centers of commerce and industry populated from other commercial centers at the seaports. The racial blends still were scots-irish in culture and protestant in church/community/government organisation. Exchanging that culture for an international socialist mumbo-jumbo, and pretending that it is American too, is exactly what has tea partiers so mad...not the existence of non-pure whiteness.

True for some, perhaps, but not for your humble correspondent. Like so many white, privileged, slave-owning adolescents, my first sexual experience was with our sassy, independent-minded, and opinionated house maid.

She looked a lot like this, and I’ll never forget what she said, as she tugged down my knee-breeches and her eyes bugged out with delight: “Lawdy, lawdy, Massuh Bissage, you done gots a baddie biggsah brothah, you does!” She let out a chuckle and squatted her massive self on my hegemony until soon I was pumping her full of great gobs of liquid master race.

So it is a simple fact that some white Americans fully realize how black they are. It follows, thus, that there must be some black Americans who realize they have some white in them. Those would be the ones who do well on standardized tests.

What an idiot Andrew Sullivan is. He is constantly projecting his own ickiness onto other people's psyches and motivations. Whiteness scavenged from a fear of and attraction to its opposite? What does this fool think the "opposite" of whiteness is? Opposite?

BTW, I want to be very clear that I am not connecting Sullivan's projection of his ickiness to his sexuality per se. Everyone's sexuality probably contains a powerful quotient of ickiness, which is part of what makes it psychically compelling. It is rather Sullivan's insistence that his particular ickiness be used to characterize everyone else's thoughts and motivations that I find condescending, cloying, and controlling.

Make no mistake about it, Andrew Sullivan is scared - which is why he's lashing out in an Alinsky fashion.

He's scared of this sentence:

"The whole point of Oath Keepers is to stop a dictatorship from ever happening here."

Sullivan, not even a US citizen, and his fellow band of HIV-infected rawmuscleglute anti-gun nuts want to disarm the nation so they can cement their power to break the laws with impunity and take milky white loads up the ass.

Remember, this is Andrew Sullivan. He broke our drug laws but used his influence in the Obama White House to get the charges dropped so as not to imperil his ability to join the collective.

Any American who stands in their way - whether it's Joe The Plumber or Stewart The Oath Keeper - will be destroyed.

No, I thought traditionalguy's post was interesting, except that neither I nor anyone I know (except one or two) qualify as "traditional." I'd wager not many people do anymore, as it excludes all wops, jews, most of the post civil war irish, anyone hispanic... (except, presumably, the chicanos in the southwest who were settled there before the american revolution?)

Also, traditionalguy describes some settlement patterns and family intermixing between scotch-irish and native groups and then makes the leap to call that "culture." Nonsense.

I did not read Sullivan or Buchanan. But I suspect Buchanan's beef is a little like RRHardin paraphrased: "No system works that opposes the rules of human motivation".

Obama and his admin believe they can relieve downtrodden Americans of the consequences of their actions or inactions. They also fail to understand the uncertainty they injected into the American way has scared entrepreneurs and business builders and risk takers. Obama may figure this out by the end of his term: actions do indeed have consequences.

AJ, If went around screaming that you are an axe murderer while you were weeding your garden, it would be pretty obnoxious if I then sternly lectured you about how the neighbors are now frightened of you.

How can an administration whose fiscal policy is run by Larry Summers and Tim Geithner be communist? Those guys are pretty much the opposite of communists, if you know anything about them. "Obama" hasn't scared entrepreneurs. Scare mongers have scared entrepreneurs, and for what?

Actually, this is the big problem today. How do you convince a bunch of completely ignorant, fabricating hysterics of anything? Meanwhile people in the middle are getting reams of disinformation.

Given that Buchanan's version of "White America" starts with the present and ends at WWII and Sullivan's version of "White America" starts with John Smith and ends at 1776, it's hardly surprising that both look ignorant.

Acutally it is a good piece by Sullivan. I agree with most of it and it is well written. It is too bad that Pat Buchanan is so blinded by his prejudices and biases. Buchanan has marginalized himself with this nonsense.

I would just point out this to Andrew Sullivan: Becareful of your own prejudices and biases, they will catch you when you least expect it.

From the beginning, in its very marrow, this country was forged out of that racial and cultural interaction."

It's interesting how vociferously liberals emphasize that this country was never, ever really a white man's country. "In its very marrow", the country was "forged" out of racial and cultural "interaction". See, it's actually kind of important who can make the claim that this is "their" country, because liberals DO regard this as important when it comes to any non-European peoples in the world. The Australian aborigines, for example...liberals are very open to the argument that they have special claims because it's "their" territory.

So liberals will go to some length to make the argument that the United States of America was never the country of white people. Thing is, it really was. Look at who signed the founding documents. White men. Look at who made up Congress and who was President. And so on and so on. If you could go back in time and conduct a Gallup poll of Americans any time before the 1960s, you would have had virtually unanimous agreement that the USA is the white man's country. That was a given. And in fact the immigration act of 1965 was passed by people like Ted Kennedy with explicit promises that it would not change the ethnic character of the nation.

But if liberals granted that this used to be unquestionably a white man's nation, it would make for uncomfortable parallels with other people in the world being displaced from their nations. Therefore it is a cornerstone of liberal preaching, and is argued with some passion, that America was never a white man's nation, and the presence in the past of some descendents of former slaves and a smattering of some few assorted other ethicities is held up as evidence. Liberals can feel it in their bones that the worst thing that could happen to them is for white people to think of themselves AS a people, a people whose nation is being taken away from them.

This is incorrect. I know quite a few small business (and a couple not so small) owners who are also rational, intelligent people from various political stripes. Simply based on President Obama’s own words, both in campaign speeches/debates and things HE has said since then have them worried about a number of issues.

They are not misinformed. They are judging the man based on the words coming from his own mouth.

And I agree. Geithner isn’t a communist. A tax cheat and incompetent, certainly, but not a communist.

Monty...Do not be so confused. The Scots-Irish culture was the dominant ruling culture in the then settled USA after 1800. That has gone on easily until the 1960s because it does accept all people including hispanics, Jews, Catholics, and Englishmen who will join in and follow its simple rules of honesty and fair dealing. Ronald Reagan, Jimmy Stewart, John Steinbeck were exemplars of that culture. Why do over educated sophists now want to destroy today it for no reason is my question. I suspect that it has to do with the guns and the religion which the traditonalists cling to is posing a threat to a cabal of neo-Roman Empire builders conspiring for a comeback here and in Europe. These Neo-empirists have operations run out of Marin County, Chicago, and NYC and Cambridge. They certainly despised George W Bush for little reason except that he represented that traditional American culture's Texan manifestation. It must be very frustrating to these Neo-empirists to fight people whose only claim to fame is that they do not surrender their families , friends or traditions when threatened by the mafia like threats. I notice that Fox News is facing such a demand for a surrender as we speak.Fox News must have spoken up for the honesty and fair dealing of the Traditional American culture, if they only did so for marketshare.

"And that's why it seems so odd to me that the election of the son of a white mother and a black father is seen as somehow a threat to American identity for some, when, in fact, Obama is the final iteration of the American identity"

The election of Obama was to many a symbol of American identity. The melting pot. American where anyone can be what they aspire to become.

To others, like myself, the objection to Obama is that he is a raving lunatic socialist, who it now is very apparent, wants to destroy the fabric of the United States. It has nothing to do with his ethnic heritage and everything with his political actions.

And BTW: Sullivan. The Catholic Church may have some "black" congregations that sing nicely Yes, those Maryland slaves. If you've never been to a Gospel Mass in an ancient black Catholic parish, try it some time.) the Catholic Church is Latin in the Classical sense. Also Sullivan needs to get a grip and look up the definition of "ANCIENT". 200 years does not count as ancient.

Just go into any Catholic Cathedral or Mission and you will see Catholicism in the Latin sense of Mexico and South America. There is no such thing as "American Catholicism"

Sullivan needs to get out more.

Does our current culture in the United States have a huge contribution from black America. Of ...freaking.... course.... and no one would deny it. It also has a large contribution from Chinese, Irish, Polish, Mexican, German, Japanese, Vietnamese, French....this is why the vision of American the melting pot has been so idealistic.

Unfortunately, precisely because of people like Obama, Reverend Wright, Sullivan, groups like LaRaza and ACORN... the melting pot is now more like one of those cafeteria trays where we are all segregated into our separate sections. Can't have the corned beef touching the poke salit.

LOL!!! VW: COWSPADY that brown stuff you have to carefully step over in the pasture.

Buchanan's column was not a column attributing concerns to race, but as Ann points out, to political issues.

Well, okay, but he certainly does spend a lot of time talking about "white America." It may be that he's using that as a demographic group, with a title and an argument that suggests he equates "white America" with "Middle America" and with "Traditional Americans." Buchanan may not be attributing their concerns to racial anxieties -- and he is probably right -- but he clearly sees the problem through a racial lens. He's not talking about the middle class, he's talking about the White middle class.

Pat Buchanan and Blimbo are about as innocent of race-baiting as Al Sharpton is. Which is to say, not very.

At some point I want to hear all the honest Althousians declare their wish to grant to Sharpton the same absolution that they bestow upon Buchanan and Blimbo.

Lemme let y'all in on something. Sullivan is not as ignorant about history as you'd like to think. So as for the reasons for why you and Buchanan think you're "losing your country", we've heard the same code words before. Spare us. The problem is that, like Sullivan, Buchanan is knowledgeable enough about history to know better. And so were Lee Atwater and the other GOP apparatchiks. As for their morals, well that's apparently a different story.

The inability to identify racial hucksterism for what it is has become pretty staggering. The rest of the country's not buying it this time, though. So either get over it or keep flagellating yourself. If you want to go down in history this dishonorably and pathetically, keep up with the latter. Subsequent generations won't see these alarmist shrieks as cries of martyrdom but as the self-loathing that they have truly come to represent.

Henry Gates made TV showing famous American blacks that they had white DNA in them, much to their surprise.

And I wouldn't be surprised to find that I or other whites I know have Black DNA in them.

So what. Does anyone even care anymore?

The only people that care are the race baiters like Jackson and Sharpton that were on the verge of losing their livelihood because its hard to argue national prejudice when Obama is in the White House.

Fortunately for them they've found a new product to sell: any and all criticism of Obama is racism.

Funny, this solo practioner (i.e., entrepreneur) has indefinitely shelved any plans to hire people or take on business partners since the election. It is impossible to evaluate the financial exposure of yet to be realized law and policy. "Obama" scares the living crap out of me. I doubt I am alone among similarly situated people.

Yes he is. About a month or so ago, he was on Dennis Miller's radio show telling Miller how the great Winston Churchill would have never condoned 'torture' and that the Brits gleaned valuable information from German POWs without having to resort to such brutality.

Needless to say the residents of Dresden were delighted to know Winston didn't lower himself to waterboard Obersturmbahnfuhrer Schultz.

...and Montana, I don't give Buchanan any absolution whatsoever. He is a bigot in the same mold as James A. Baker III, clothed in a bit of respectability by reason of competent service to the country, but at their core, Jew haters both (at least). Even a bigot isn't wrong all the time, and I'll include Sharpton in that statement.

The arguments against torture are moral ones. When someone claims there was no torture of prisoners in WWII to show how much better they were than we poor contemporaries, they overlook the morally outrageous (by today's standards) of firebombing civilian populations on purpose.

It's a moral double-standard at best, or, at worst, an ignorance of history.

Pat Buchanan is sort of a community organizer for resentful white Americans, which is totally horrible. Being a community organizer for resentful black Americans, on the other hand, is totally awesome and Jesus-like.

Scott the point I was trying to make to the humorless clod is that Sullivan is ignorant of history. He extols Churchill as someone would not lower himself to torture a German POW yet seems to overlook or simply is clueless that Churchill had no problem incinerating 50,000 German civilians in a city that had zero strategic value.

Buchanan or Sullivan are perfect examples of a little knowledge being a dangerous thing.

The New Obama Nation planned carefully and offered to us or else is a giant Ponzi scheme itself. He says confidently that once all money and power is in his hands he will cause us to recieve as a return on the Investment a high rate of benefits. The ugly and obvious truth is that Obama only plans on sending back to us and other non-contributors a small part of what he took from us, and once the unstolen part of our principal is all paid out, there is NOTHING LEFT, then the surprising crisis will require martial law. The linchpin is the Cap and trade tax being required for the emergency of a warming climate hoax by Obama's buddies over at the new world government. It will ensure that our collapse will be quick enough to avoid any messy Traditional American elections. Is it Sarah Palin's time yet?

The sooner you honestly admit to Buchanan's bigotry, the sooner you realize you're better off not defending him - particularly on a point articulated in a piece titled "losing the nation".

Even if the author of this post's interest in courting controversy blinded her from seeing that, the commenters deserve every right to know just how spectacularly he discredits any legitimate criticism of Obama.

Listen, even beyond Hofstadter's more specific claims, there is a certain amount of generalized paranoia and ignorance that blends quite well with specific, ideological criticisms of Obama and the left. This well of negative emotion and absence of thought serves as a palette upon which almost any demented idea or sociopathology can be projected, unfortunately. So be damned careful if bigotry is truly your concern. While a number of you seem to possess no racial animosity, there is a great opportunity to continue throwing that animus in there as has been done over and over again in the past and present.

Fears of cultural "loss" and/or loss of privilege is a more subtle thing than bigotry itself. But it's not that much different in motivation. C4's rants readily attest to that.

Who among us are and are not "traditional Americans"? I'm surprised that the smarter and morally superior among us do not know the meaning of, and derivation of, the word "tradition."

Tradition: from the Latin "traditio," meaning "that which is handed down."

Applied to the case of America, it would mean the founding principles upon which the nation was founded, such as freedom and opportunity without government interference. These founding principles are what has been handed down, they are the "tradition." Now some may, such as the Maoists who infest the Obama Administration do, reject such principles, but most Americans do not and, certainly, all "traditional" Americans do not.

Remember when they were all in (and many in the Democrat party in Congress voted) to authorize war with Afghanistan and Iraq, but then they all got the vapors when they found out that the NSA was actually listening to phone calls?

To the confused left, it was morally OK to shoot a terrorist, but not OK to listen to his phone conversation to America.

I don't think I'd give them that much credit. I recall quite a bit of teeth gnashing back when we were bombing the piss out of them in Afghanistan and asswipes like Noam Chomsky were pissing down thier pant legs about the silent genocide.

MUL...Pat Buchannon is not a good representative of traditional American culture. He is suffering from the anti-semite disease. The "mixture problem" in Buchannon makes a mess for everyone. He is right and a good communicator of many ideas until he mixes an anti-semite poison into his analysis. You are then faced with rejecting the good he writes to avoid swallowing the poison, or going ahead and swallowing poison. Those are both bad choices, Eventually the necessary rejection of the poison does require a tuning out of Buchannon's good ideas too. Let's change the subject to Sarah Palin's thoughts which have no poisonous add ons.

Ok. You guys want to point out that firebombing civilians is worse than torturing. Fine. Fair point.

And yet, if you want the challenge that goes with defending torture, I'll bite.

Critics of torture contend that it corrupts the "aims" of the entire endeavor. An incident of overkill on the civilian casualty front was not the stated policy of the U.S. military in WWII. There was Dresden. And then there were Hiroshima and Nagasaki - which could have been argued as necessity for ending the war.

But Dresden didn't become the self-fulfilling prophecy that a policy of torture is. The policy of torture teaches you to subvert reality in order to satisfy your need to engage in it. If you don't care that the information is faulty you obviously don't care whether you gain intelligence that actually tells you something useful for the operation.

At least with firebombing the evidence for its gratuitousness and faultiness is right there in front of you, in plain sight. With torture you start to sympathize with the gratuitousness and rationalize it as necessity - despite the fact that it backfires by yielding information that is more likely to be wrong than if it were obtained by legal means.

What was that line about the Iran-Iraq War? "Why can't they both lose?"

Sully does probably have a point, although I refuse to read either piece: hip-hoppin' Americans, and their rock'n'roll and R&B parents and jazz-fan grandparents, don't realize how culturally black they are. They don't think about Indians as they eat their corn pops and tomato sauce and french fries either.

Sorry, but Sullivan's point that even Winston Churchill was "too moral to torture" is just plain wrong. There's no way to explain it away.

Ok. So now you want to say that Sullivan's ignorance of history relates to his defense of Churchill's morals. Fine. That's at least better than Hoosier's implication that Sullivan was unaware of Dresden.

Morality is not an absolute thing. Maybe conservatives think it is. Maybe it's defined once, for all time, in a book that was revealed thousands of years ago.

But this is a very contestable idea.

I'd wager that more people believe that mores change, and morality necessarily changes as well. Would you guys still condone slavery? Or is that a bad question? How about prima nocte? Monarchy?

I don't think conservatism is a defense of the idea of static morality. Or should I say "moral stasis".

So assuming morals change - (or even assuming today's preferred conservative perspective that as times change, morals shouldn't - and an adequate defense of them is necessary in the face of challenges to them), the idea of being able to argue effectively about what constitutes moral behavior is more important than whether or not a specific, single act of vengeance was allowed to proceed.

The point is not that Sullivan doesn't understand history. Twisting his statements to make a point out of them that wasn't in there does not show his ignorance.

I didn't twist anything Montana. I was simply pointing out that Sullivan has no historical perspective and therefore displays his ignorance of history.

I mean don't hold up the man as a model of moral virture on torture when he had no qualms about firebombing a non-strategic enemy city. I mean this isn't a difficult concept for clear thinking people. Of course Sullivan hasn't fit that category for quite some time now.

Beatings, sleep deprivation and starvation used on SS and Gestapo men. POW camp in Kensington kept secret and hidden from Red Cross

I agree with in general about the torture issue. You wrote: Critics of torture contend that it corrupts the "aims" of the entire endeavor. I agree with that. I think the Bush administration and the CIA was wrong on both moral and strategic grounds.

But the argument against Sullivan is not about torture or atrocities. It's about sloppy thinking and rhetorical excess.

Sullivan used Churchill and "the good war" as a foil for Bush and his bad war. Churchill is a revered figure, but the actual history does not support Sullivan at all. (Night time bombing, BTW, was standard British practice in WWII and done with the full knowledge that it mostly killed civilians.)

Had Sullivan said that Bush should have done better than Churchill (maybe he could have used your "morals change" argument), he would have been on safe ground. But that's not what he said.

Such a concession to accuracy would have undermined his rhetorical game.

He's either dishonest or ignorant. Take your pick. (I pick the former.)

As for Buchanan, he's a bigoted idiot. Seneca the Younger sums up this contretemps most succinctly.

I mean don't hold up the man as a model of moral virture on torture when he had no qualms about firebombing a non-strategic enemy city. I mean this isn't a difficult concept for clear thinking people. Of course Sullivan hasn't fit that category for quite some time now.

If you want to taint Sullivan's defense of Churchill's morals as a sign of fuzzy thinking, you can go right ahead.

I'm pretty sure there are good historians who will see that an atrocity or two committed during the course of a war in which much greater atrocities were inflicted on you by that enemy, doesn't discredit the moral character of whoever authorized it. Don't forget that the very idea of "war crimes" came into prominence because of the behavior of the Germans in WWII, and not because intentionally avoiding civilian casualties had been de rigueur for centuries or anything.

And again, this gets us away from the point that torture fulfills the aim of making morality overly flexible, in a negative direction, in order to suit the intelligence you want to gain and the vengeance you want to exact, and not the intelligence that reflects the reality you need to contend with in order to benefit the operation.

Sullivan (but not only Sullivan - far from it) argues that torture is unique from other atrocities in this regard in that it corrupts one's moral judgment and one's capacity for moral judgment. He seems to have a point.

America must be the only country in the world where immigrants can get off the boat and start lecturing the inhabitants about not being proper Americans....I haven't read a lot of Sullivan, but I get the impression that his dominant cultural trait is not gayness or Catholicism , but of an Imperial Briton set upon intructing the primitive natives how to dress for dinner.

Maybe it's defined once, for all time, in a book that was revealed thousands of years ago.

Yes, and that book is the Classic of Rites.

I'd wager that more people believe that mores change, and morality necessarily changes as well. Would you guys still condone slavery?

No.

Or is that a bad question?

Not at all - but the implication of your question is that, at the time slavery was widespread, it was also moral, which, uh, I think most people would disagree with. There are some modern "moral" precepts which I think are highly contingent on modern circumstances and not universal at all. The immorality of slavery is not one of them.

Indentured servitude, though, I don't really have a problem with.

How about prima nocte?

This is sort of on the borderline between contingent and not. I don't know.

If you want to taint Sullivan's defense of Churchill's morals as a sign of fuzzy thinking, you can go right ahead.

Thank you, I will.

I'm pretty sure there are good historians who will see that an atrocity or two committed during the course of a war in which much greater atrocities were inflicted on you by that enemy, doesn't discredit the moral character of whoever authorized it.

Well it was more than one to two but I’m not trying to keep score. As a matter of fact, I’m not even attacking Churchill’s moral character either. Again, I was simply making a point through the use of irony.

And again, this gets us away from the point that torture fulfills the aim of making morality overly flexible, in a negative direction, in order to suit the intelligence you want to gain and the vengeance you want to exact, and not the intelligence that reflects the reality you need to contend with in order to benefit the operation.

Interesting. Well try this one on for size. Strategic bombing of German cities was favored by the Brits as a way of breaking the will of the civilian population and inflict massive destruction on their industrial complex. Well guess what, it had the opposite effect. If anything positive came out of the campaign was that the Luftwaffe was effectively taken off the battlefield and that’s only if you choose to ignore the losses of the Army Air Corps.

I’m not making a case for or against torture. Personally if I can get Achmed the Islamofascist to sing like a bird by giving him halal meals and a goat to keep him company than fine. If it requires more direct and uncomfortable methods I’m fine with that too.

Sullivan (but not only Sullivan - far from it) argues that torture is unique from other atrocities in this regard in that it corrupts one's moral judgment and one's capacity for moral judgment. He seems to have a point.

I read the Buchanan piece. Snore and good grief. I could care less about yearning for the past. On the other hand, I really like "traditional" American values so I'd certainly like to see none of that tossed aside into the so-called diversity bin.

Sullivan on the other hand. Double good grief. Why is it everything this Brit writes devolve into essentially him playing with his winky dink? Wouldn't read it on a bet.

Kansas City;This was intentional right?Sullivan is so self obssessed that he cannot see straight.

As for the two articles. Surely Mr. Sullivan deeply understands the irony of a British writer complaining about an American writer's "white" bias.

As for Mr. Buchanan. He's come a long way. In the past he'd be the guy to pull you aside and say "Did you see who just moved into the nieghborhood!?". Now he's proud to say "Some of my best friends are colored."

Waziristan is already pretty much a blasted, desolate landscape. See, e.g. this description of the territory (p. 312). See also this description of the Waziristan agencies (starting at p. 243 and continuing to 255), their people, and their territory.

I'm pretty sure there are good historians who will see that an atrocity or two committed during the course of a war in which much greater atrocities were inflicted on you by that enemy, doesn't discredit the moral character of whoever authorized it.

Don't forget that the very idea of "war crimes" came into prominence because of the behavior of the Germans in WWII, and not because intentionally avoiding civilian casualties had been de rigueur for centuries or anything.

What? No authorizing atrocities ALWAYS reflects on their moral character. Churchill had his good points, but he was an amoral thug in many ways.

And your position is that massacring thousands of innocent civilians is OK , but lets not torture a few terrorists?

He didn't grow up with traditional america. I only remember it on the grandparent level, but I remember it. I had exposure. He can't possibly comprehend the difference in order to miss it. Maybe if he went home to England more often, saw the enormous changes there, and realized he misses things he never imagined he miss...just like missing your grandparents.

Anyway, to my mind, it doesn't have much to do with race. It has to do with the kids and grandkids of that generation rejecting their parents', and grandparents' culture - most specifically Christianity, but lesser issues as well.

IOW, it was lost within the family first - many of whose offspring grew up to become attorneys and government bureaucrats. It was lost with the dream of sending those generations to college.

wading into this morality of war discussion with trepidation...(I know this has been mentioned elsewhere by others but...) at present it is better to blow up an Alcaida member and his family (maybe even his children) via a drone than to submerse him for 30-50 seconds. go figure.

In Waziristan? Possible, but unlikely. Until a year or two ago, the Pakistani government hadn't bothered to set up a modern administrative apparatus in the tribal agencies. Instead, they just continued sort-of-governing the territory through Political Agents, the system implemented by the British Raj. There has been minimal development.

The thing you'll never get a white liberal to admit is that a white person has every bit as much right to want to preserve his people's culture, ethnic character, language, way of life, etc, as any other person in the world. White liberals have no problem with minorities having an ethnic consciousness - they celebrate that. But let a white person do it and it's probably racist, stupid, ignorant, evil, and motivated by hate. It's not possible for a white man to love his ethnicity, culture, etc....not possible for him to celebrate whiteness the way non-whites celebrate their non-whiteness. And in this, white liberals go against human nature and thus are doomed to destroy themselves. Unfortunately they may destroy the rest of the white people too in the process.

Just once I'd like to hear a white liberal say "yes, a white person can have an identity AS a white person, and love and want to protect that, without it being hate."

It really pisses me off - to my knowledge, no other people on earth have this problem where a third or a half of them are actively trying to erase their peoples' unique identity. Somehow we whites are the ones who got stuck with this bunch of idiots.

I think the point Buchanan is making and has made on numerous occasions is that traditional values Americans, square Americans, no longer hold center stage culturally, as they did through the '50s. They have been marginalized and mocked by the image makers and trend setters. And part of that marginalization has been unstinting praise for all things black, in which blacks are portrayed as vibrant and authentic and whites are condemned as both repressed and repressive.

What's racist about noting that our elite opinion molders are anti-white? As to why they are anti-white, which is to say anti-themselves? Shelves have been filled trying to understand the phenomenon.

Good thing then, since this is what we are selling our children and grandchildren into with Obama's out of control spending and conversion from a free society to a socialists workers (and I do mean workers) society.

I was not terribly impressed the first time this popped up on Sullivan's site, but the response from readers has been great. I especially liked the closer look at Huck Finn, in a book (or article) recommended by a reader.

A melting pot thoroughly blends the elements put into it, like chocolate, to a new substance, a homogenous mass. America's pot is lumpy with specifically isolated cultural enclaves, and so not fully melted. I'm glad the concept of America as melting pot is largely failed because it allows specific unique traits to remain purely excellent. The best example I can think of is in the area of cuisine, but applies to other areas of culture as well. Not all of it has been successfully bastardized as it's been imagined, through fusion, if you like, incorporating New World ingredients to Old World recipes, NTTAWWT, there still exists here resolute culinary purists and I'm glad to have them.

Obama and many many other examples of products of mixed marriages and unions are fine examples of successful melting. What a word. The rest of America less so.

But I do not take my observations from British observations, nor do I reject them outright. Just as I do not take them from French observations, or any other foreign observations for that matter. Why would theirs be any more perspicacious than my own, as I'm living it? I've yet to encounter a European who does not fancy themselves expert on all things American. It's very odd, in that any given typical American will readily admit to being largely ignorant of the finer points of life, especially political life, beyond their own borders even in those cases where they're actually more traveled. So while I find, say, Tocqueville's Democracy in American interesting if a bit lumbering, to steer away of Sullivan, I would hardly make sense for me to base my understanding of America or Americans or life in modern America upon it.

The Pot America is large and lumpy, huge, in fact. So in the end you may know whereof you yourself stand, and you can observe others, and imagine still more, but you cannot know whereof all America stands and speaks. You are not smart enough for that, even if you think so.

Hey ya'll, come on over to our campus and celebrate "Halloween in Other Cultures" next week! Find out how other cultures honor the dead! Not that there's anything wrong with regular Halloween or anything.

A melting pot thoroughly blends the elements put into it, like chocolate, to a new substance, a homogenous mass. America's pot is lumpy with specifically isolated cultural enclaves, and so not fully melted

So, Chip....what you are saying is that America is more like Spotted Dick or a Christmas fruit cake?

In reality, I agree with you. I think the point I wanted to make is that American culture takes a little bit of each culture that has arrived on our shores and incorporates it into a congomorate whole. It doesn't mean that you lose your ethnicity as Mexican just because other people have borrowed some of your food and holidays.

rhhardin said..."Losing the nation has to do with sudden growth of Washington control, which as the WSJ somewhere today says, is typically ineffective and destructive. Never more than in the Obama administration."

montana urban legend said..."At some point I want to hear all the honest Althousians declare their wish to grant to Sharpton the same absolution that they bestow upon Buchanan and Blimbo."

Now, THAT is funny...and absolutely ridiculous.

First of all, there are few if any really "honest" regulars here, and asking them to actually admit to anything or grant any form of absolution to anyone they consider the least bit liberal tells me you need to spend more time reading the standard bitch and whine comments that permeate this site on a daily basis.

traditionalguy said... MUL...Pat Buchannon is not a good representative of traditional American culture. He is suffering from the anti-semite disease. The "mixture problem" in Buchanan makes a mess for everyone. He is right and a good communicator of many ideas until he mixes an anti-semite poison into his analysis.

Buchanan is called an anti-Semite because he always brings up the fact that the Jewish Bolsheviks and the Red Terror not only gave rise to the Nazis, but killed more people than the Nazis did. But in American eyes (but not E European ones) only the Nazis are covered in media and culture as the unique, evil 20th Century ideology.

Just as in how Americans remain ignorant of the impact of communism and the inhuman Japanese Imperial forces in 20th century Asia.

Or how they have been educated to ignore casualties and suffering in WWII outside what "the Jews went through". 2 of 20 young Americans may have an idea how many American casualties there were in that war. One in 20, if that, in numbers of Poles, Chinese, Greeks, Filipinos, Yugoslavs, Lithuanians killed..But 18 of 20 has been educated in the numbers and details of "Jewish suffering". Buchanan considers that warped history, justly so..as with the education of Americans as to why WWII was started, why it was so wide in scope, and what each side fought for. If American youth were polled, for their top answer they would say WWII was started because Hitler wanted to kill Jews. That we fought it mainly to save Jews and advance social justice for repressed minorities...but we stained our effort by racism and atrocities just behind the Nazis in interning "Japanese-Americans" and in A-bomb genocide.And our winning was mainly due to empowered women on the homefront, black aviators, Japanese-Americans fighting in Europe, and the heroic Jewish scientists of the Manhattan project who pleaded for the Bomb not to be used...but White Christians did it anyways..

The other anti-Semetic "sins" of Buchanan were (1) In saying we should stay out of ME wars that serve Israel's interests but not ours. Beware of Neocons. (2) The Israel Lobby is as detrimental to American interests as the Saudi Lobby, and even more powerful. (3)We have to break up the Israeli espionage network in America, now 3rd behind China and Russia.

I don't see Buchanan as wrong on those issues, or his warning of what NYC financiers were doing to the country, or his warnings about America deteriorating under mass immigration and the slow sabotaging of America's greatest past institutional strengths and stengths of values..

A Rolling Stone writer was doing an article about an old blues singer. He asked the old black man which singer had influenced him the most when he was growing up. The singer replied "Gene Autry". The writer was completely flummoxed and left that detail out of his profile. We are all of us about as authentic as Madonna's English accent..... I would say our one true native trait is our bigotry. It is very wrong for Sullivan to mock Buchanan's bigotry. Our bigotry has made us who we are. Prejudice not only insulates us from the idiocies of foreigners like Sullivan but the sting of this bigotry also helps us mold aliens into the American template. Twit Brits like Sullivan should be mocked for their class prejudices. He is against Nascar whites not because of their politics, but because they are low class. Sullivan, like so many unassimilated Brits on our shores, is a snobbish asshole. Perhaps continued interaction with prejudiced Americans who consider him a jerk will help to make him a better American.

exhelodrvr1 said... Jeremy,"Anybody here believe the very first people on this planet were...white?

They were black."

So you are saying that evolution/survival of the fittest resulted in white people? What a horribly racist thing to say!!

===============Jeremy is going to hate the Genome project results then. We know that the 1st stage of modern homo sapien's development was in Africa. That we almost became two separate species..the Khoisa and the rest of mankind. Who in Africa did little to advance. Then the 1st wave of Man went out of Africa along the southern Asian Coast. Reaching Australia even, 50,000 years go. And despite all Jared Diamond's excuses, the cultures and innovations of the Africans and 1st Wave migration remained uninnovative and static for tens of thousands of years until more advanced cultures of later-developing human stocks began blending with them. (The case in India, N Africa, SE Asia). This was driven by mutations in out of Africa human stock of a second Wave that began In Central Asia - then differentiated into white and East Asians..reaching Europe, East Asia 30,000 years ago. Then replacing or supplementing older human stock in the ME, N India, SE Asia. And spurring what was static cultures to advance by new human stock in the mix, or replacing the existing humans altogether (ME, N Africa). And people of the 2nd Wave began populating the Western Hemisphere 30,000 years ago as well..almost as soon as they reached the edge of East Asia.

Then another key mutation believed to give newer homo sapiens more cognitive advantages than the one 30,000 years ago happened in the ME about 8,000 years ago and rapidly spread (called the 'civilization" gene by some.)

Many liberals are fairly sick at the notion that few advances humans made happened by indigigenous, unmutated Africans then the 1st Wave human stock. Crude stone implements and digging sticks..That most of man's progress is from the descendents of the people that came from the Central Asian mutation 30,000 years ago, then the ME one 8,000 years ago. And Chinese and Japanese are pointing to 3rd mutation they suspect advantaged E Asians with high IQ and unique spatial abilities that happened some 4,000-2,500 years ago and may have been driven by people in that group better able to digest and exploit starch nutrients when food was scarce.

And theories abound on other mutations in other genetically isolated populations in Europe, Asia, geographically remote places that gave "Darwinian" advantages to what those ethnicities tend to do very well compared to other ethnicities/races. (Nepalese, E Africans, Caucus mountain people, Jews, Samoans, etc.)

Liberals shouting "all people are the same, only resources and wise nuturing make a difference!" are in for as rough a time debating science. As rough as the Christian creationists and Fundies had with Darwin and Biblical researchers back in the 19th and 1st half of the 20th Century.

The reason for Word War II was the need to beat the opposition governments to the actual production of a simple U-235 fission device. We won. The Germans and the Japanese were trying develop that device too. All the rest of the war was driven by that need. The reason we won is that the Jewish Physicists were unwelcome in German Universities. It was all started by an Hungarian Jew named Leo Szilard who came up with the physics foe it long before the Nazi Industrial Project to rob, capture, kill, and incinerate all living Jews had begun.

Can we all just stop reading Sullivan, stop taking his nonsensical rants seriously, and stop talking about him? That includes you, Ann. The guy is so morally compromised, such a hypocrite, that we're all giving him a platform he doesn't deserve. Look, the guy's sole claim on legitimacy is that he stands above sordid American politics, he's not republican or democrat, not left or right, therefore he has more credibility. That's his card, and we're all legitimizing it by referencing him all the time. It's a lie. He's a wholly owned subsidiary of the Gay left who still hasn't gotten over being 'betrayed' by Bush over gay marriage. Since then, all the blather he spews can be traced to this. It would be comical if he wasn't so snarky and filled with vitriol while all the time trying to present himself as some kind of philosopher king. I could go on, but most of us know his deal, so once again I reiterate: let's all just forget about him....

Well I'm relieved that Sullivan is off the hook because his racist angst is genuine "Anglo-Saxon" and not some illegitimate faked-up indefensible racism like we gots here in 'Merica. I mean, he's English and therefore actually white unlike all of us self-loathing quadroons.

Now, come on, get with the program, people! Don't be 500 years behind the times! Give it up for President Barack Hussein Dwayne Elizondo Mountain Dew Herbert Camacho Obama! Now, who's ready for some Monday Night Rehabilitation? I hear that Beef Supreme is really going to give Glenn Beck what for on this week's show!

C-4... Haven't you read your hero Buchanon's take that the War was unnecessary, etc... but started for no good reason? Well I have enlightened you on why we fought the war at all. FDR never tried to save a Jew. All we ever went into Germany for was the spearhead by Patton's Third Army into the area where the Nazi scientists had their atomic materials stored. WE did what you always reccomend America do and we never wasted resource one on saving any Jew that did not get us to our only goal in the war. Are you proud now, or are you still convinced that the whole war was fought to save Jews by the Jew lover Roosevelt? Put away the propaganda and read the history that is now available. The Jews are not perfect, but they are good people and a lot smarter than you are.

Speaking of literacy & culture, the name of the author to whom I presume you referred is spelled Jane "Austen".

Oh, well, you probably have, through your powers of conjecture, discovered that she changed it from "Austin" to hide the fact that she was a Joo & was the inspiration for Rebecca, the Jewish alleged witch, in Scott's Ivanhoe or something like that.

I'm glad for some changes, while others make me feel that we've lost something. Maybe it's just because I grew up and became a lawyer, which gave me a view of society that was like turning over a rock.

I think most average Americans, white, black or brown would like things to be like MLK's Dream, but Father Coughlin "conservatives" like Buchanan and reverse race-baiting by the likes of Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton have kept anger simmering.

The sexual revolution has changed a lot of things and not always for the better. The traditional family now seems passé, and millions of kids grow up with divorced parents.

And the activist courts of the 1960s seem to have turned us into an aggregate of tribes, each ready to sue over any slight. The success of the civil rights movement which was too long coming, has also made everybody seem to look for their inner victims. It's no longer enough to be let alone, everybody else must validate us.

I wish I were one of those real smart guys. Then I'd know why anyone has ever believed Pat B. as important. Okay, he was once a speechwriter. So what? He has never been elected to dogcatcher, much less a County Commission.

And then there's Andy. He did not, and I checked my records to make sure, ever ask me how to be a homosexual Brit making outlandish claims about a woman's birth canal. And yet he thinks he should tell me how to be an American.

I'm also curious about all these comments about Code Words. Seein' as how I'm a rural white redneck seems like I ought to know these code words. Can someone leave a message on my blog as to where I can get the secret codeword book. All I know is American English and sometimes I'm not so hot at that.

Why, if I only new all the codewords I could have secret meetings out here and maybe score with some of those secret agent chicks. In the movies they all have long legs and huge chests and lots of guns and stuff. If only I knew the secret codewords.

Anybody here believe the very first people on this planet were...white?

They were black.

Get over it.

You are dumber than a bag of hammers.

Just because people lived in Africa, doesn't mean that they were "black".

There wouldn't have been enough people to have races then, dumbass.

The races that we have today took hundreds of thousands of years to develop, and the races didn't differentiate all at the same time.

Nobody has any idea what the first modern humans looked like. It doesn't take very long for skin color to change either--look how dark Melanesians and Australian aborigines are, despite being about as unrelated to African blacks as anyone can be.

I am about as ethnic American as it gets. My ancestry is Scots-Irish, English, and French. My parents' families (on both sides) have been in America before the Revolutionary War... well before. My distant relatives fought under Washington, and on both sides of the Civil War.

This country was founded on an idea: as long as you bought in to the principle of America you could be an American. That principle is simple: enlightened self-interest. We protect each others' rights in order to protect our own. If you're willing to defend and respect others' rights to life, liberty, and property, then you can be one of us. The neat thing about our fundamental rights is that they are negative; they do not impose a cost on others.

What Buchanon, the Tea Partiers, and others (including me) are upset about is that there is growing number of individuals who DON'T believe in these rights, who want to substitute other "rights" for them, who believe that if they need something then they are ENTITLED to it regardless of the obligation this puts on others. Things like health care, welfare, and other peoples' money. Just because they can get a majority of our elected officials to ignore the Constitution and vote for these programs as a way to buy votes.

I've worked my butt off ever since I was a teenager. I've been lucky (but luck is preparedness meeting opportunity), too. I have a well-paying job and savings. Yet, I'm getting fed up with working almost half the year just to pay my taxes. When a person has to work for 40% or more of his time just to pay the government then is he really free? We all know what happens if you don't pay the Man... he comes and asks politely, and if you say no he doesn't ask, he takes by force. Ask Randy Weaver what happens when the government thinks you didn't pay a $200 tax.

Back when the country was founded, the only taxes were sales taxes. You didn't pay taxes on property or income. When you pay taxes on property, you don't own property, you rent it... and if you don't pay the rent the landlord kicks you off. Today, we have a tax system where the majority doesn't pay taxes, and robs the minority that does. If that isn't tyranny then what is?

This country has been broken for a long time, but things are coming to a head. Obama doesn't help things when he bashes the rich between bites of arigula and wagyu beef, throws parties at the White House for his political cronies on the taxpayer's dime, or takes Michelle on Air Force One to New York for a date costing us taxpayers hundreds of thousands of dollars. Instead of being a healing figure, he's become the Great Divider... and he's too arrogant to acknowledge this and modify his behavior. Obama is a one-term president, and the only remaining question about his term is how much worse he'll be regarded than Jimmy Carter.

Whether it's because people go all John Galt, or our bankers the Chinese cancel our credit cards, Atlas is going to shrug and the whole world is going to come crashing down. Our economic and business policies have created a playing field where America can no longer compete, and until this changes our economy is going to be in the toilet. You'd think we'd learn from history, but as the saying goes, "Experience is a hard school but fools will learn at no other."

It isn't going to be pretty, and the chances of getting a free country at the end of it are slim... but the feisty types that make up the ethnic heritage that founded this country, the "bitter clingers" who were busy stockpiling guns and ammo after the election last year, are not going to end up on the bottom. Not if they can help it.

No matter what you think of "white" traditionalism, it's there. Doesn't matter if Pat Buchanan is the messenger or not. It certainly isn't Andrew Sullivan who views American Traditionalism through his immigrant, "my friends are american" lens.

It's only a pride you can get from being born here or from overcoming whatever hurdles you have to to become an American, that make you and American.

If you become and American because of some great talent, you will never appreciate it as much as someone who has broken the shackles of a former totalianarianship. Sorry Andrew, the UK doesn't qualify.

As a native American, I look back on what my people were able to accomplish against overwhelmingly bad odds, I can say that I am proud to be an American.

Sullivan sees what he wants us to be and has no respect for what we were able to do. That makes him worthless.

I don't know what the heck "white traditionalism" is supposed to refer to. My ancestors have been here for a century or two, and we don't think about being white or what "white" tradition is. We think about American traditions, the same as most of my non-white friends do. Hard work, opportunity, et al.

Your petty feud with Sullivan is so important to you, you are willing to author a post defending Pat Buchanan. The man chose the seventieth anniversary of the start of World War II to write a column condemning France and Britain for disputing Nazi Germany's legitimate claim to parts of Poland.

Yes, in Pat Buchanan's warped version of the world, Hitler was right and France and Britain were responsible for starting WWII.

Remember when Sully was fascinated with Orwell, and took seriously his criticisms of "Alinski Rules" politics and where it could lead. Well, now we know, Andy loves big brother, who apparently bears a striking resemblance to Andy's new mentor, Axelrod

I used to think that Buchanan was simply the last vestige of the 1930s' Isolationist Wing of the Republican Party. But while I still think that is true, it is pretty obvious that his views are also shaped by his virulent anti-semitism. Buchanan may support the Tea Party movement, but he is never going to be a leader there.

Jon Sandor...Use your own mind and forget what the story was that was used to motivate the country to fight in 1940. We were a two ocean isolated new world country that firmly believed in isolation from European entanglements. Leo szilard informed FDR of the Super Bomb and that suddenly started a draft in 1940, passed lend lease to sustain England, and started pushing the Japanese Empire into a corner across the vast Pacific Ocean to "save China". We had our own B-17 bombers and we knew that the Germans could build bombers that could easily reach NYC. Then the week after Pearl Harbour we put into action a complete war plan to defeat Germany First using all our resources while we held off the Japanese on a shoestring until Germany had been defeated. For example, the First Marine Division had to hold out nearly abandoned for the first 3 months of daily Japanese assaults to retake Guadalcanal, all kept from the American people, The marines were finally told they would not be supplied due to a lack of resources in the Pacific and had permission to surrender, all the while every resource America had was being poured into liberating North Africa. The point is that we were racing Germany for the Fission Device "super bomb", and defeating the Japanese who had actually attacked us was a sideshow. Good news was that the Marines refusal to surrender shamed the Admirals in DC into sending some support to them and the Japanese Army pulled out. Then 33 months the world's first Super Bombs were delivered by an American B-29 on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and not by a German Bomber on NYC and Washington DC.

The assertion that there was not a distinctive “American” culture and that it was overwhelmingly shaped by white Europeans is simply ideological blather.

Interestingly enough, the unique American culture is most often defended by people who were not born here … in other words immigrants. Unlike native-born Americans who simply don’t have any basis of comparison, immigrants are fully aware of that culture because they can compare it to what they have left.

At one time if they wished to become “Americans” (and why not if they chose to come here), they adapted to it, even if they never lost their accents. Once it became acceptable to live in America without becoming “American” our society became the mess of lumps that now exists. Brother Buchanan decries that while the Left celebrates a lumpen-culture.

One thing I am becoming convinced of is that Brother Obama is in the process of setting race relations back at least a generation, which is not a “good thing” as Martha Stewart would say.

I'm willing to bet Andy doesn't live within 100 miles of a black person. We have enough homegrown liberal ivory tower effetes giving us lectures on what it means to be "American". The last thing we need is a snobbish Brit import.

Would that matter to Buchanan? I doubt it. He's speaking of the political issues of the day, describing the views of a demographic group, and rejecting the idea that their attitude arises from racial animosity.

I did reread. What on earth is this statement if not a defense of Buchanan?

Explain how it isn't and I will apologize.

(Of course rather than explain you will just throw out an insult about how I am too stupid to understand your oh so subtle point)

The assertion that there was not a distinctive “American” culture and that it was overwhelmingly shaped by white Europeans is simply ideological blather.

This statement is of course nonsense and made by someone who doesn't even know the first thing about American history.

There are parts of this country where a generation ago it was not unusual for native born Americans to have lived their entire lives and never learned English. One of our current Supreme Court Justices second language is English (and I bet you don't even know who it is).

But the gulah dialect is part of the English used in coastal Georgia, so we have never seen it as another language. Good question.

Just like Moneyrunner, you are so wrong. Gullah (and learn to spell the name of the language correctly) is recognized by linguists as a separate language. And if you have ever heard native Gullah speakers speaking in their native tongue, only the most ignorant, anglo-centric racist like Cedarford would insist that it was the attempt of sub-human black folk attempting to mimic "white" language.

Freder...We grew up with that dialect in the Uncle Remus Stories. It is understandable like "soldiers English" is when you try and listen. Sorry for offending you by a misspelling. The books on it say it is West African language used to interract with the local red necks and preserved by their isolation in the Coastal barrier Islands running fron Jacksonville, Fl past Charleston,SC. I am only Georgia-centric and seem to be Cedarford's worst nightmare. Georgia has many Gullah speakers. Have you been to Daufuskie Island reachable only by boat?

There's one bet I'll not lose: Andy might live in New York, but he doesn't rub elbows with minorities. He's a liberal elitist poof, who lives an affluent lifestyle in NYC. He'll whine about "racism" and the black community, as long as he doesn’t have to live with or mix with them.I grew up in a very diverse neighborhood 30 miles west of Cleveland. Serbians, Irish, Italians, Romanians, Germans, Polish, Hungarians, Slovaks, Mexicans, Blacks, Puerto Ricans, Croatians, you name it, they’re here. Right across the street. I know them; their freinds and aquaintences. I've been in their homes and they, in mine.

Face it, Andy doesn't know any more about "being black" than he does being straight.

Allow me as another foreigner( i am Indian) to counter this piece of trash from Sullivan.

Lets not forget that this is the same man who thinks football is boring and STILL does not know the rules of the game after living here all these years.

And he is commenting on American culture.

May be he should try telling all the white exodus suburbanites from just about any medium sized (Austin, Portland)or big city that they dont realize "how black they are".!

This is NOT to deny the undeniable influence of black culture on America.But to say that white Americans "dont even realize how black they are" is about the most sweepingly dumbass generalization that you can make.

Ofcourse it helps to be an Euro snob like Sullivan to make such douchbag comments.

What Andy Baby means by "Traditional American" is "White-Christian-Heterosexual-Conservative"; the people who have denied him his life-long dream of wearing a wedding dress in public without feeling self-concious.

Unless one is completely retarded (like Rachel Maddow), or completely disingenuous (like Andy Baby), there is no way one can mistake Buchannan's 'traditional Americans' for Nazis, which is what people liek Sullivan and Maddow want you to believe.

BTW, I'm no fan of Bushannan, but even he doesn't need to have his words and views distorted like this.

Gabriel...Really the Gullah in Georgia is easier to listen to as English than the Shakespear's English in the plays from 1600. And gullah dialect is what Joel Chandler Harris's Uncle Remus Stories were written in, although the Disney movie made it a little easier to understand.There is a webstie you can pull up on Google that tells stories spoken by Gullah speakers. It is easy for me to understand, and many local African Americans in Atlanta from 1950 to 1960 spoke much like that.